History of the World Wide Web July 2, 2002 Many people get the Internet and the World Wide Web confused. To put it in simple terms, the Internet is a large network of computers linking together other computer networks, while the World Wide Web is just one of the services made possible by the internet. Other services include: e-mail, File Transfer Protocol, and Gopher. What makes the web more appealing than the others is that it combines text, graphics, multimedia, and links to other files. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a physics researcher, came up with “HyperText”, and presented to his peers that an information sharing system must be universally accessible to anyone connected to the computer network, it must have a consistent user interface regardless how the information was accessed, and it must contain links between documents forming a “web” between text, graphics, sound, and video. In March of 1991, the vision became a reality. Due to its “web” like structure, this information sharing system became known as the World Wide Web. The information was “served” up…hence “web server.” A document to be transmitted over the web is delivered via HyperText Transfer Protocol (http). While working from remote computers, Berners-Lee and his physics colleagues used a special program to call up a “web browser” and access the files they wanted by typing in the name of the computer containing those files. In January of 1992, the WWW was made available to the Internet-using public. There were 50 web servers in operation by the end of 1992. While attending the University of Illinois at Urbana, Mark Andreesen developed a mouse-based interface to the WWW in 1993. By the end of 1993, the number of Web servers jumped to 623. The number was at more than 2,700 in June of 1994, and six months later it nearly quadrupled to 10,022.